


deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds

by Ias



Category: The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Hallucinations, Paranoia, Psychological Horror, Psychological Trauma, Self-Mutilation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-07
Updated: 2015-08-07
Packaged: 2018-04-13 11:31:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4520256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ias/pseuds/Ias
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It is the shield-arm that is maimed; but the chief evil comes through the sword-arm. In that there now seems no life, although it is unbroken."</p>
<p>They said no man could kill him, and Eowyn is no man. But perhaps what they meant was that he could not die.</p>
            </blockquote>





	deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds

There are no dreams. Above all, it is never a dream.

She keeps a vial of athelas with her at all times, and at the worst moment she uncaps it with practiced fingers to crush a leaf under her nose. It’s so little, but it helps. All she has left are the little things.

Sometimes her body gets so cold she thinks she will shatter by moving. The dull, bone-deep ache in her shield arm returns, familiar and manageable. That wound she can bear.

“My arm is not alive.” She speaks aloud to the darkness as her husband sleeps beside her. She hasn’t been sleeping. Not for a long time.

Faramir wakes at the sound of her voice, blinking but quickly alert. It’s a skill he needed, one which kept him alive. Now it has become yet another scar. He looks from her eyes to the pale hand resting on the bedcovers, folded as neatly. “What are you saying?”

“It’s dead,” she tries again. “The flesh, it isn’t mine. It went cold the day that I—that day.”

Faramir takes her hand in his, and he kisses her fingers, her palm, her veins. “It’s only the night’s chill,” he murmurs into your skin. “I can feel your warmth. Your pulse.”

_It’s not my pulse,_ she wants to say.  _There’s something else moving inside me._

She draws the hand away.

Eowyn tries to approach it logically. She stares at the arm. It is still flushed with faint color, no different from her other. She can feel the fabric of her pants beneath its fingers. But she knows that the flesh is dead, that it’s rotting on the inside. Something got inside, and it never left—only got quiet. She can feel it even now, laying still against the marrow of her bones, still but always there.

“Can you move it properly?” the healers ask. “Can you feel?” They do not understand when Eowyn returns, again and again, like a supplicant without the language for her needs. She does not have the words to tell them what pains her, that beneath the skin lay shards of cold steel. “There is nothing wrong with you,” they say gently and then firmly, and then they stop saying it at all—only giving her the athelas.

She takes to eating it, slipping the leaves under her tongue and tasting that harsh bitterness. She wonders if Faramir can taste it on her tongue, whether he can taste the rot underneath.

Sometimes she manages to sleep. When she awakens to the deep blue corners of her room, she swears that the ghosting of fingertips had drifted over her cheek. The arm is lying by her face, fingers curled like the legs of a dead spider.

It happens when she is awake, those little movements that aren’t her own—the hand reaches out to touch the petals of a flower, to trace over cracks in the wall without her intent. The fingers twitch. They scuttle like cockroaches. When her own hand reaches out to clamp an iron grip over the opposite wrist, strange looks direct her way. They see only a woman with a hunted look in her eyes. They do not see the goosebumps that press themselves up from inside her skin.

 

There are no voices in her head. The sounds are never words. It’s only the slow murmur of something squirming under her flesh, like maggots against the bone.  _What do you want?_  she wants to scream.  _What do you want?_ It has no voice to respond—it tunnels deeper. They said no man could kill him, and Eowyn is no man. But perhaps what they meant was that he could not die. Perhaps some things never died as long as there were still those to bear them on.

“Your nails,” Faramir breathes one morning. A smear of blood streaks the sheets where the hand carelessly brushed. Faramir’s own warmer hands take it up, turn it over with morbid curiosity. The nails are lined in red, loose, inflamed. It looks as if the flesh is pushing them out. The skin beneath is steaked with grey.

“Have you been scratching in your sleep again?” Faramir asks. His voice is hesitant now. He is starting to understand.

Eowyn says nothing. The hand is clenched into a fist that she cannot feel. Beneath her elbow there is only deep, gnawing ice.

 

The skin is streaked with new veins, purples and blues and greys spidering across Eowyn’s flesh. They are beautiful. They tighten like roots.

“Spend the night in the healing ward,” Faramir tells her. His eyes are sharp with fear. “Aragorn will be here on the morrow.”

“Then it will all be over,” Eowyn agrees. Her voice does not sound like her own. This time it is Faramir who does not respond.

 

Lying in bed alone in the healing ward, Eowyn does not sleep. The hand clenches and unclenched on the blankets, the tendons twitching and bucking against the casing of her skin. It’s awake now. Awake, and moving. She can feel it probing upward, rounding the bend of her arm and sending tendrils digging upward. Soon it will reach her shoulder. Then her heart. It’s so very, very cold.

There are no guards to stop her as she passes through the door. No healers awake to watch over her as she finds the room she is searching for. The shelves are lined with jars of herbs, strips of bandage, metal tools of surgical sharpness.

It’s one of these she selects, a long blade whose teeth are designed to chew through bone.  _The hands of the king are the hands of a healer_ , but it’s not healing she needs now. Her hand is ungentle, but ever is it steady. 

She sits on the floor. Her skin burns at the touch of the cold metal against it. Inside of the arm, something screams as high and faint as the whistle of cooking meat. It is not her flesh that will part its ragged lips, not her blood that will spurt up red and urgent with every dull scrape of the saw. This is an exorcism. This is victory.

She begins.


End file.
